PDP BoT: Return of the gerontocrats

Chief Tony Anenih may be a few months shy of 80 years old, but the aging politician and warhorse shows no sign of his zeal for politics and passion for rough tackles flagging. Instead of heading for the knacker’s yard, he has just been elected to head the coveted Board of Trustees (BoT) of the Peoples Democratic Party at a time President Goodluck Jonathan felt hemmed in by enemies. Between the time Anenih led the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the old Bendel State and the time he assumed the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and then on to his tumultuous roles in the PDP, there was no let up on his machinations and ruthless politicking. He will have another opportunity to mould PDP affairs in his image, and he will do it with gusto, especially because he came in as a consensus candidate.

Everyone believes that the second coming of Anenih is tied to 2015 elections. This is probably true. By sheer amateurish display, both Jonathan and the party’s chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, have got themselves embroiled in so much controversy that desperation quickly crept into the part, sapping it of all its energies as it prepares for the coming polls. Given Tukur’s enthusiastic endorsement of Anenih and the president’s secret admiration for the tested old warrior, it was not surprising that the party did the unusual to get Anenih back in the saddle. He will not want to disappoint them. The news, therefore, is not that an old soldier has returned to his former haunts. The news is to find out what punishment he is capable of inflicting on dissenters within his party and outside. For a man who when he was previously BoT chairman hardly waited to catch his ethical breath as he plotted feverishly and unscrupulously to undermine the opposition, there is nothing to indicate he will be fastidious about principles or ideologies. He knows his brief, and we will hear from him shortly and brutally.

But rather than wait in apprehension, and considering how much of him is known, it will be the responsibility of Nigerians inside and outside the PDP to meet Anenih and his cohorts with courage and hope, in battlefields or at negotiating tables. Old men are often vulnerable in battlefields as they are usually anachronistic and overconfident in war rooms. The country must, therefore, meet his every whim with intuitive brilliance and indescribable feints. In the old man’s fading eyes, we will see the desperation of Jonathan, the man unleashing him into battle. And in his jaded dribbles, we will recognise just how much faith the ruling party is reposing in their old soldiers and old war tactics. Commodore Oliver Perry was famously quoted in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1812 to have said, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” The excuse of the Nigerian opposition in 2015 must never be that they didn’t know the enemy, nor that when they met them, they didn’t recognise them.

Increasingly, it seems, the opposition (All Progressives Congress?) will square off with the PDP gerontocracy in 2015. Let the opposition go into that battle with fleet-foot politicians, men and women who understand what it means to be faced by unethical and ruthless warriors, and men and women who once the battle is joined recognise that the possibility of defeat does not exist.